Group mounts defense of (Gitmo chaplain) Yee

[Newsjock]

http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20031121/frontpage/154653.shtml

SEATTLE -- Muslim and Chinese-American advocates angrily denounced the treatment of detained Army chaplain James Yee and demanded his release on Thursday.

Yee, a Chinese-American, was arrested Sept. 10 while flying home to meet his wife, Huda, and their 3-year-old daughter, who live in Olympia. He has been charged with violating regulations that govern safeguarding classified information. He counseled al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners detained at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba.

... Advocates say Yee is innocent of the charges and that the military violated his civil rights by detaining him on charges that typically are handled administratively.

Mohammad Kaddourz, co-founder of the Seattle-based Arab American Community Coalition, called on the Bush administration to end the hypocrisy of fighting overseas to install freedom and justice in Iraq while denying those rights at home.

more

[La_Serpiente]

1. I am all for him

I think racism was in effect in this individual case. He tried to lobby his superiors there to treat the inmates better. There were numerous attempts of suicides there and possible torture scenarios. These people missed their homes back in the Muslim world and he just wanted to make it a little easier for them.

Perhaps his xenophobic superiors felt that he was being "unpatriotic" when he started asking for leniency on the prisoners.

[DogKing]

2. But didn't he steal?

This apparently boils down to the fact that they said, "Capt Yee, did you take classified material from Gitmo?" "No." Said Capt. Yee. But they found a CD full of classified materials in his luggage taken from Guantanamo when he arrived in the US. Now, I understand lobbying for better condition but if you steal from the Army, geesh, what do you expect? He could've gone to the media and highlighted prisoner's plights, not (supposedly) smuggle info about them out.

[La_Serpiente]

5. No, that was the other gentlemen there

he was the one that was putting the information on CD's and sending it back to Syria. Yee didn't do anything wrong. Sure, he may have had some documents, but nothing on the scale that would be considered "harmful" in my opnion.

Also, he is a sufist, not an extremist. Sufism is a branch of Islam that preaches non-violence, not fundamentalist Islam.

[slaveplanet]

3. Loftus says

that the spook Logbooks that were lifted from Gitmo, are an intelligence failure of the first order. What amounts to everything we know about al Qaeda Ops from the prisoners , was given back to AQ leadership hands.Whether Lee is the guilty party is up to question. But the sponsoring the chaplains has links up and through Grover Norquist and beyond.

“OLBERMANN: How does this tie back into the thing that apparently pulled the stopper out of the drain, if you will-The developments at Guantanamo Bay? How rotten is the system of the interpreters and the chaplains-the Muslim chaplains that Alamoudi was involved in setting up?” (Idem.)
11.       As theorized in FTR#’s 356, 386, 405, Islamist elements of this Underground Reich milieu appears to have successfully infiltrated the US military.

“LOFTUS: It’s as rotten as it gets. Think of the Muslim chaplain’s program that he set up as a spy service for al-Qaeda. The damage that’s been done is extreme. It wasn’t just sending home mom and dad messages. From the prisoners. These guys, this network in Guantanamo, stole the CIA’s briefing books. Everything that the CIA knew about al-Qaeda is now back in al-Qaeda’s hands. That’s about as bad an intelligence setback as you can get.” (Idem.)

www.spitfirelist.com/f433.html

[MrSoundAndVision]

4. I wonder what,,,,

he had on him, probably direct evidence of mistreatment of these people, evidence of horrible acts against the Geneva Conventions. I'd say he was probably following his consience, stupid idiot for carrying classified materials, should have just went to the media with claims that this was happening. Either way he would be in jail, that way at least we would know why he did it (as a public).